Dormant domains may be dormant because who wants to run a site people can’t access?

Privacy campaigners the Open Rights Group claim that UK ISPs are misinterpreting court orders to block copyright-infringing sites, which results in almost 40 per cent of domains being blocked unnecessarily.

Figures compiled by the group suggest that of the 1,069 sites blocked by injunctions, over 400 of these have been blocked in error, suggesting a high degree of, in the words of executive director Jim Killock, "maladministration".

Blocked sites have included a Sci Hub page and in one case, the personal website of a Dutch developer.

However, the ORG's own numbers also show that the great majority of these domains are either broken, parked or are up for sale, which itself suggests that the court orders have been effective - if you're running a pirate site, you're unlikely to want to continue using a domain if millions of people can't easily access it, you'll simply move to a new one, a new court order will be granted, and the game of online whack-a-mole continues.

Killock agrees that this is "absolutely the case" for such a high number of for sale, broken or parked domains appearing on its list.

But because there's no easy way to tell when blocklists in the UK are expanded or relaxed, or if domains are being used for legitimate purposes, organisations like the ORG can't easily check on what has been caught up in the dragnet.

Furthermore, the ORG also acknowledges that its own list is incomplete; the number of blocked sites is apparently somewhere in the region of 2,500. To that end, the ORG is calling for greater transparency, so that the public and groups like itself can better assess how effective the court orders have been.

In the court of the copyright kings

In a bid to crack down on online piracy, rights holders including the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Premier League, regularly apply for court orders to legally compel the UK's main ISPs - BT and its subsidiaries EE and Plusnet, along with Virgin Media, Sky and TalkTalk - to block access to sites they have shown to host, or host links to, pirated content.

This has been the case since April 2012, when the BPI, via a High Court order, forced ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. Since then, in order to speed up the process, right holders expand and revise their blocklists on an as-and-when basis and pass these on to ISPs, who block or unblock accordingly.

Rights holders PC Mag UK spoke to argued that in order to stop people running such sites from evading blocking orders by registering similarly-named domains and second-guessing, the process should remain confidential. The process of unblocking sites which are either no longer hosting or pointing people towards copyrighted content should also remain private.

Killock argues that this is unnecessary: "The site owner will know very quickly when their domain is blocked, because traffic will drop. The user will know it is blocked, because they can't reach the site. So it's hard to see what advantage infringers of either kind gain by having the list made public."

"Without a transparent list, checking is not possible. So the choice is between accepting some weak arguments from rights holders, or ensuring public accountability."

Blocked by association

In one example, the personal site of developer Kleis Auke Wolthuizen was blocked under a court order requiring ISPs to prevent access to KickassTorrents, a now-dead directory of torrent files.

Kickass was commonly abbreviated to KAT, something which was reflected in its various domains - kat.cr (when it was registered in Costa Rica), kat.ph (when it was registered in the Philippines) and so on. Wolthuizen’s site apparently fell afoul of the order because of the similarity its URL - kat.kleisauke.nl - had with the likes of actual Kickass domains.

At the time of writing, the ORG's site blocked.org.uk claims that just one ISP in the UK - TalkTalk - maintains a block, but when PC Mag UK reached out to TalkTalk for more information, we learned that the block had been lifted.

We were told that as per the current arrangement with rights holders, kat.kleisauke.nl is not on the latest list, and so it has been unblocked.

This example perhaps illustrates Killock's point - to the best of his knowledge, the site was still blocked by one UK ISP, when in fact it was not. Killock added that in the event of mistakes being made or domains being unblocked, ISPs could easily publish a whitelist.

"ISPs could without causing any controversy publish a list of domains that have been unblocked This would allow us to make sure they have all acted on the instructions they have been given," Killock said.

But by the same token, if a site's owner found that all of a sudden, a huge chunk of UK traffic dropped and they were doing nothing wrong,

Whether rights holders and ISPs will act on the ORG's recommendations is another thing; spokepeople PC Mag UK contacted either declined to comment or did not respond at the time of publication.

Update: since publication, blocked.org.uk now reports that no active blocks apply to kat.kleisauke.nl.